Hurriyet Daily News reports: The number of messages tweeted by users in Turkey has not dropped since access to Twitter was banned, statistics have shown. What’s more, the hashtags #TwitterisblockedinTurkey and #TurkeyBlockedTwitter became trending topics worldwide only a few hours after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced his intention to “wipe out” the microblogging website.

According a report from Twitturk, which records the statistics of Turkish Twitter users, over half a million tweets were posted in just 10 hours, despite the ban.

That number would mark no sharp fall from the average number of tweets posted in the country, which is around 1.8 million per day.

“I don’t care what the international community says. Everyone will witness the power of the Turkish Republic’s state,” Erdoğan said when he announced the ban.

Everyone is now witnessing the power of the state and the fact that it is less than Turkey’s prime minister seems to have imagined.

What that seems to imply is that when Erdoğan issued his order, no one around him had the guts to tell him it wouldn’t work.

Either that, or they purposefully set him up, knowing that this show of strength would quickly become a very public display of his impotence.

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News, analysis and opinion with occasional editorials by Paul Woodward.